The invention relates to a compact milling machine for milling off damaged road surfaces.
Such milling machines are already in use in various sizes. For milling off motorways, they have a milling width of about 3.75 meters and thus enable an entire motorway lane to be milled off in a single operation. Small machines, which in particular come into use on ordinary roads and in towns, have a correspondingly narrower milling width. Such machines can be used for warm milling or also for cold milling. In the cold milling process, the road surface to be milled off is not heated prior to milling off, and consequently the wear on milling tools, which are arranged on the milling roller, is relatively large. On the other hand, preheating the road surface to be milled off virtually doubles the milling machine size because of the burners, which are to be arranged ahead of the milling machine, and the gas tank for the heating gas required for operating the burners.
Because of these relatively large sizes, warm milling machines are therefore used in particular on motorways and straight ordinary roads, whereas smaller cold milling machines come into use in particular in towns and villages.
For this purpose, and also especially for minor repair work, so called compact milling machines have been developed which work by the cold milling method and are relatively small in size. They can therefore be used without difficulty on narrow and winding roads and in villages and towns in order to carry out the requisite milling work there for repairing the damaged road surfaces.
After the milling process has been carried out, the road surface material milled off by the road milling machines normally remains on the milled-off road surface and has to be transported by means of power sweepers and special loading devices onto lorries and removed.
In this connection, since the work is relatively labour-intensive, loading devices for road milling machines have already been developed by the applicant, which loading devices are arranged at the rear of the machine and which collect the accumulating, milled-off material during the milling process and load it by means of a loading belt onto a lorry following the milling machine.
Such loading devices are known, for example, from the German Patent Specification Nos. 2,500,861, 2,600,863, 2,829,125 and 3,032,643.
However, the loading devices described in these earlier patent applications by the same applicant are only suitable for the relatively large sized road milling machines mentioned at the beginning. In connection with the recently developed compact milling machines, difficulties result insofar as these compact milling machines have a somewhat different construction.
These consist of a chassis, provided with a drive motor and having a front wheel pair which can be steered and driven, and a milling roller, which can be driven by the drive motor in the opposite direction of rotation of the chassis wheels and is attached to the end of the chassis, the milling roller having support wheels adjustably arranged on their holders. Moreover, these support wheels at the same time represent the rear wheels of the chassis, so that the milling roller is arranged virtually at the rear end of the chassis.
Although the arrangement of a loading device, as known from the abovementioned patent specifications, at the rear of the chassis is possible in principle, these loading devices do, however, obstruct access to the milling roller and consequently hinder the milling tool change, which is frequently required especially when cold milling. Previously, therefore, the new compact cold milling machines were only operated without a loading device, and the milled-off material had to be removed from the milled-off road surface by additional operations.